It was nearly midnight, when Edwin was awakened with a dim feeling of something the matter. Cuthbert was pulling him. "Edwin! Edwin!"
"What is it?" he cried. Edwin's hurried exclamation was lost in the bang and rattle all around. Were the windows coming in? He sprang upright as the bed was violently shaken, and the brothers were tossed upon each other.
"What now?" called out Mr. Lee, as the floor swayed and creaked, and he felt himself rolling over in the very moment of waking. The walls were beginning a general waltz, when the noise of falling crockery in the outer room and the howling of the rabbiters' dogs drowned every other sound.
A sickly, helpless sensation stole over them all, Mr. Lee too, as everything around them became as suddenly still—an eerie feeling which could not be shaken off. The boys lay hushed in a state of nervous tension, not exactly fear, but as if their senses were dumfoundered and all their being centred in a focus of expectation.
Effie gave a suppressed scream. Mr. Lee was speaking to her through the wall. "It is over, my dear—it is over; don't be frightened," he was saying.
"It—what it?" asked Cuthbert, drawing his head under the bed-clothes.
"Our first taste of earthquake," returned his father; "and a pretty sharp one, I fancy."
At this announcement Cuthbert made a speedy remove to his father's bed, and cuddled down in the blankets. Mr. Lee walked round the room and looked out of the window. It was intensely dark; he could see nothing.
"Oh my head!" they heard Audrey saying; "it aches so strangely."
Mr. Lee repeated his consolatory assurance that it was over, and returned to bed, giving way to the natural impulse to lie still which the earthquake seemed to produce. The violence of the headache every one was experiencing made them thankful to lie down once more; but rest was out of the question. In a little while all began again; not a violent shock, as at the first, but a continual quaking.